Blue Bloods v. Blue

In Massachusetts as the result of last week's primaries, November voters will have little choice about the type of man they get for Governor. They can have blue blood or blue blood. The Republicans renominated their honest rawboned Yankee squire and present Governor, 50-year-old Leverett Saltonstall, whose integrity is prized by voters of both parties, long disgusted with the corruption of Boston's Irish Catholic machine. Even the Democrats pushed aside tradition, in the shape of Irish Catholic Francis Edward Kelly, 39-year-old ex-laundryman and onetime Lieutenant Governor, to pick another blue blood: the 48-year-old, smart, handsome, energetic mayor of Springfield and president of the flourishing Package Machinery Co., Roger Lowell Putnam.

Seldom have two so evenly matched opponents been put up against each other. Both are independently wealthy. To match the proud name of Saltonstall, Putnam is descended from the Lowells on both his father's and his mother's sides. Putnam has six children; Saltonstall, five. Like his longtime acquaintance the Governor, Springfield's mayor is a product of Back Bay boyhood, Boston's snooty Noble and Greenough private day school, of Harvard (where Saltonstall starred as an athlete, Putnam as a magna cum laude) and of Harvard's best social clubs (Hasty Pudding and Fly for Putnam, Hasty Pudding and Porcellian for Saltonstall). Putnam served as ensign and lieutenant (j.g.) in the U.S. Navy during World War I, while fellow alumnus Saltonstall was busy as a lieutenant in the field artillery.

In the race for Senator the Irish Catholics do have a representative though no machine tool, squarejawed, curly-haired New-Dealing Congressman Joseph Edward Casey, who won with the Administration's backing. In November he will face another blue-blooded Republican--the present Senator, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., handsome grandson and namesake of the famous rock-ribbed politico.

Chief victory pulled off by old-line orthodox Democrats was the beating of young Representative Thomas Hopkinson Eliot, who helped draft the Social Security Act, by onetime Irish Catholic Governor James Michael Curley, four times defeated in his race for Congress.

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